Page 66 of Fractured Ice

The door closes.

Knox and I are already getting up, bolting for the door.

The Spring Fair is packed in the way Ridgehaven events always get packed when the weather cooperates, which today it has, the March sun making it warm enough that half the campus has apparently decided they have nowhere else to be. There are booths everywhere, games, food vendors, a stage setup at the far end with someone's acoustic guitar filtering through the crowd noise. Kids are running. Someone's dog has gotten loose from somewhere and is enthusiastically visiting every food booth in sequence.

Knox walks beside me with the energy of a man who has decided he's here for one completely legitimate reason that has nothing to do with whatever I'm here for. Which is kind of funny. What is his purpose here? Why did he get cash? He doesn’t want to kiss Sienna…

We find the kissing booth in about four minutes because Knox is better at reading fair layouts than I am, which is a niche skill I've never thought about before but am grateful for right now. It's set up near the edge of the lawn, a little pink table with a sign. There's a girl behind it currently, someone I half-recognize from the SAB, student activities board, working through a short line of people while looking like she's having the time of her life.

Knox stops walking.

I keep going for two steps and then look back.

He's not looking at the booth exactly, just somewhere near it, with the look of someone who has decided this is his location now and he's staying in it. There's no obvious reason I can see. Nothing in his eyeline is immediately interesting.

"Knox."

"I'm right behind you," he says, without looking at me.

I look at what he's looking at. I look at Knox. I don't know what to do with it yet, so I let it go.

Right now I've got somewhere to be.

I find a spot near the booth and wait. Fifteen minutes later the girl behind the table looks up as Sienna appears from the direction of the food vendors looking like she's had a full day of it, hair slightly windswept, a small patch of something that might be powdered sugar on the sleeve of her jacket. She's carrying a water bottle and a look of profound resignation.

She's also so beautiful it makes my back teeth ache.

She takes over the booth from the other girl, who leaves immediately. Sienna settles into the chair, puts her water down, and looks at the sign with the sigh of a person who has made a decision they fully intend to see through and don't like at all.

Then she looks up and sees me.

Her eyes narrow. Not angry, not yet, just clocking me, running the calculation of what I'm doing here and what it means and what she's going to do about it. Even that expression, even that specific version of her face, does something to my chest that I've given up trying to reason my way out of.

I walk up to the booth and lean against the table.

"I'd like a kiss," I say.

"It's a dollar. A simple kiss. No tongue," she says, pointing at the sign without looking at me.

"Right." I reach into my pocket.

One dollar on the table.

She watches.

Another dollar.

She keeps watching.

Another dollar. Another. I pull out the cash I got from the bank and I put it down in stacks, methodically, and I watch her expression travel from exasperation through disbelief and arrive somewhere near the involuntary edge of amusement that she's trying very hard to suppress, and I keep going.

By the time I'm done the pile is significant. She stares at it.

"Ethan."

"One dollar a kiss," I say. "I can do math."

"That's—" She looks at the money. "How much is that?"